Opponents Vow to Continue the Fight after Trump Reauthorizes Domestic Spying Law

A controversial U.S. legal framework concerning domestic surveillance is poised to live on for another six years, but opponents say they plan to continue the fight. In a widely expected move, President Donald Trump signed the bill one day after the Senate approved it in a 65-34 vote. At issue is...

ACLU Attorney: U.S. Citizens Legally Unsheltered from Abusive Surveillance

U.S. law has failed to protect Americans from widespread and excessive surveillance, a dire situation that requires immediate attention from citizens, lawmakers, attorneys, privacy experts and the courts. That was the urgent warning Jennifer S. Granick, Surveillance and Cybersecurity Counsel at t...

Lobbyists Press Trump to Support Strong Encryption, Surveillance Reform

A lobbying organization that includes some of the Internet’s most valuable entities made a plea to President-Elect Donald Trump to support the expansion of strong encryption and reform government surveillance activities. The Internet Association on Monday sent a letter to Trump’s transition team...

Anti-Surveillance Measure Quashed: Orlando Massacre Cited as Reason

The House voted Thursday to block passage of an amendment aimed to rein in U.S. domestic mass surveillance by the NSA and protect strong encryption standards citing Sunday’s Orlando tragedy as reason to fight surveillance reforms. The so-called Massie-Lofgren amendment was considered a key privac...

Meaningful Surveillance Reform Risks Defeat Over US House Rules Change

Civil liberties groups are anxiously waiting to see if an anti-surveillance amendment will be added to a Department of Defense spending bill Tuesday. The so-called Massie-Lofgren amendment would rein in U.S. domestic mass surveillance by the NSA and protect U.S. encryption standards. The amendmen...

Lame Duck Senate to Vote on NSA Reforming USA FREEDOM Act

The United States Senate will move to vote on the USA FREEDOM Act before the current congressional session closes at the end of the year, a move that pleases digital rights groups. In its current form, the bill would ban the bulk collection of Americans’ private records while granting the...

AOL Releases Transparency Report Lobbies for USA FREEDOM Act

Noting that Saturday was the 13th anniversary of the passage of the USA PATRIOT Act, the Web giant AOL this week released its latest transparency report, detailing estimations of how many Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act FISA orders and National Security Letters NSLs it’s received in the las...

EFF Launches New Anti-Surveillance Site

The EFF has launched a new site dedicated to educating users about how to resist pervasive surveillance online, through the promotion of encryption and other tools and the publication of first-person stories from people around the world who have fought surveillance in various ways. The new site, ...

September 2014 Yahoo Transparency Report

There was less clamor from governments and law enforcement around the world for data collected and stored by Yahoo, but nonetheless, the technology giant still fielded more than 18,000 data requests over the first six months of the year. Yahoo yesterday released its third Transparency Report, and...

Dropbox Reports 80 Percent of Subpoenas Contain Gag Request

Most U.S. government subpoenas for data on Dropbox users are accompanied with a request not to inform the user in question. Dropbox legal counsel Bart Volkmer said those gag orders are repelled unless there is a valid court order. The revelation accompanied the release of the cloud storage...

Government Requests for Google User Data Continue to Climb

While the number of requests for user information that Google receives from governments around the world continues to rise–climbing by 120 percent in the last four years–the company is turning over some data in fewer cases as time goes on. Google received more than 27,000 requests for user...

NSA Surveillance Reform Demonstrate Need for Public Scrutiny

The Snowden leaks and the ensuing critical spotlight shone on the National Security Agency’s surveillance programs have nudged many technologists, privacy hounds and politicians away from their desks and onto the front lines calling for reforms. Two nights ago, the New York Times reported that...

Crypto Pioneers Write Letter on NSA Surveillance to Obama

Perhaps the biggest condemnation of President Obama’s address last Friday announcing reforms to the NSA’s surveillance programs was his failure to mention any of the agency’s alleged involvement in subverting cryptography standards and the impact that has had on the trustworthiness of products...

European Commission Urges U.S to Reform Surveillance Methods

The European Commission is urging the United States government to make some changes to the way it handles surveillance to help restore the trust in the relationship between the EU and the U.S. The commission is asking for the U.S. to promote privacy rights internationally, adopt the EU’s data...

New Bill Would End Mass Surveillance

UPDATE: Rep. Jim Sensenbrenner R-Wisc. is introducing a bill that would counteract many of the elements of the U.S. PATRIOT Act that enables the mass collection of data belonging to U.S. citizens. Sensenbrenner’s bill is called the USA FREEDOM Act, a quasi-acronym for Uniting and Strengthening...

Crypto Party, Anti-Surveillance Rally in DC

WASHINGTON — Saturday marked the 12-year anniversary of the initial signing of the controversial USA PATRIOT Act, the anti-terrorism bill signed into law shortly after the terrorist attacks on Sept. 11, 2001, sections of which have allegedly given federal law enforcement the authority to...

Technologists Scrutinize Impact of Surveillance on Economy

If you’re looking for silver linings among the Snowden leaks and the breadth of the NSA’s surveillance activities, they could be found in two things: 1 the math upholding encryption technology is, as far as we know, solid; and 2 Tor apparently drives the U.S. spy agency batty. “I’m surprised,” sa...